Two men, pictured from behind, sit on a sunny hill overlooking a construction site. These men are Palestinians from the village of Bil’in and this hill overlooks an expanding illegal Israeli settlement.
It is 2005 and they are watching apartment blocks for Jewish settlers grow brick by brick, on land was that illegally taken from them under the Israeli occupation.
This photograph is one of the 732 images that form Act of State: 1967-2007, an exhibition of images from Israel and the occupied territories, taken by several photographers over 40 years of occupation.
Ariella Azoulay, a Tel Aviv-based “visual philosopher” (as she styles herself), curated the exhibition to tell a story of Israel and the Palestinians through pictures that show “facets of the occupation in which the media is not interested”. She says she “did not intend to reconstruct the hegemonic discourse about the occupation that is composed of ‘big’ events that make news”.
It takes at least an hour or two to experience the exhibition thoroughly, as the photographs, which would not be found easily in anything less than explicitly alternative media, mean little to the viewer without the context provided by the captions. In one picture, for example, a boy sits on the ground and appears to be relaxing against a cement barricade.
The caption explains that this 14-year-old is being detained indefinitely by the Israeli Defence Force after he mistakenly crossed a demarcated line — which the army shifts every day — while shepherding animals on occupied land.
Azoulay had no budget to pay for copyrights and so approached photographers directly. The exhibition was first shown in Tel Aviv in 2007, after which it went to Italy.
Israelis don’t often get to see images like these, she says. “There is no liberal media in Israel.”
Dr Kelly Gillespie, director of the Johannesburg Workshop for Theory and Criticism at the University of the Witwatersrand, who worked for two years to get funding to bring the exhibition to South Africa, says that Azoulay chose to open it during Israel’s 60 years of independence celebrations in 2007, so as to interrupt the merriment and create an outrage around the occupation.
Azoulay feels that Israelis have become accustomed to the occupation. “Most Israeli Jews perceive the occupation as a justified project that will end one day,” she says. “But they don’t think about the fact that it’s been four-and-a-half decades and it is totally integrated into their so-called democracy.”
She is a slight woman and at first appears soft-spoken, until she begins discussing the occupation. She explains how the current anti-occupation movement is not strong enough and that Israeli activists often mistakenly separate the occupation from the Israeli regime.
“The occupation is not a temporary and external project, but part of the Israeli regime that should be overthrown,” she says.
But there are those who see through it. “I am not alone,” she says. “Each of us has a story of revelation — the day we understood the big lie. Each of us was brainwashed. It’s a long process to get rid of all these lies; it doesn’t happen in one day.”
She sees South Africa as an inspirational place to exhibit this work. “Seeing that those in power can give up their power, at least partially, gave me hope regarding Israel,” she says. “Unfortunately, Jewish Israelis still have a long way to go until they will understand the liberation in giving up the power position. We are still very far from the end of our apartheid.”
She created this project as “a way to imagine the possibility of overthrowing the regime, like an exercise that will, one day, affect reality”.
Act of State is on exhibition until July 31 at the Old Fort on Constitution Hill